1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the fields of data processing. More specifically, the present invention relates to the provision of graphical user interface.
2. Background Information
Graphical user interface (GUI) is known in the art. In particular, the single plane metaphoric desktop is well known in the art, adopted by numerous operating systems, including the Windows Family of Operating Systems, available from Microsoft of Redmond, Wash.
In a single plane metaphoric desktop, various icons are provided to represent the user's computer, the user's network neighborhood, mapped devices, installed programs, file/document folders, the files/documents themselves, and so forth. A user would access the various resources, files and documents by interacting with the icons, as one would interface with various objects in one's desktop in the physical world.
Further, various display windows are typically rendered on the single plane desktop to facilitate concurrent displays of execution results of multiple applications executing at the same time, including execution results or contents provided by remote “on-line” applications, such as content or web servers of the world wide web. The execution results or contents provided by the applications are rendered or displayed in their corresponding display windows. Under the prior art single plane metaphoric desktop GUI, no distinctions are made between rendering the execution results or provided contents of “locally” executed applications, and remotely executed “on-line” applications.
With advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking and communication technologies, increasing number of devices, in particular, digital computing devices, are being “networked” together, via persistent wire line or wireless networking connections as well as dial up connections. As a result, more and more network dependent applications are deployed, including emails, e-commerce, and the earlier mentioned world wide web. Further, the provided contents have gone from mundane textual contents to rich multi-media contents. At the same time, as the affordability of these network enabled devices continue to improve, more and more novice users are now going “on-line”.
Thus, further enhancements to the present GUI that provide even greater user experience, especially for the content rich execution results of the on-line applications, are desired.